Youth, seniors build community

Sunday

Apr 9, 2017 at 6:34 AMApr 9, 2017 at 6:34 AM

Madeleine List

BOSTON — 78-year-old Gerald Bedard and 16-year-old Ann Froes sat at a desk in the replica U.S. Senate Chamber at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute on Saturday looking over a packet of notes and discussing their presentation for the model United Nations session that was about to begin.

This kind of young and old partnership is exactly what Kathi Bailey, director of the Yarmouth Senior Center, hopes to foster through her intergenerational model U.N. initiative.

A group of about 32 people from Cape Cod, half of them senior citizens and the other half students from Dennis Yarmouth Regional High School, traveled to Boston on Saturday to take part in a model U.N. session about issues of aging around the world.

Participants were grouped into pairs and given a country to represent. Caitlin Moore, education director at the United Nations Association of Greater Boston, and a team at her agency prepared packets of information on each of the countries and distributed them to the participants before the session.

The intergenerational model U.N. session ran like a meeting of the real U.N., gavels and all.

Video: Model U.N. session at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute

Mock delegates gave presentations about how their assigned countries address aging and where the problems lie. Participants also asked questions of two Stetson University students who called in via Skype to give their thoughts on how countries should deal with their aging populations.

Froes, of West Yarmouth, and Bedard, of Yarmouth Port, represented India, a country with limited access to healthcare for its older people, especially those who live in rural areas, and a lack of access to clean water, Froes said.

“India is deeply concerned about the issue of aging,” she said to the room of mock delegates.

Saturday’s intergenerational model U.N. was the second of its kind for Yarmouth. The first, hosted at the Yarmouth Senior Center in October, addressed the issue of clean water.

Bailey, who brought the program to Yarmouth after developing it while working in Clinton, said the forum encourages civic engagement among people of all ages and teaches everyone about how government works.

“The end goal is really to broaden the understanding of public policy,” she said.

For the seniors involved, it’s a way to stay active, keep learning and interact with young people.

Bedard, a former elementary school teacher in Worcester, said he didn’t start getting involved with the senior center until his wife passed away two years ago.

“It’s a necessity just to stay busy and keep my mind busy,” he said. “If my wife hadn’t died, I wouldn’t be involved in any of these things. Mentally, it keeps you on a positive track.”

Besides participating in the model U.N., Bedard works with English language learners at Dennis Yarmouth Regional High School, volunteers at a church, plays bocce and helps with a senior center-run project involving second-graders from the Marguerite E. Small Elementary School.

“Usually, if it wasn’t for the senior center and Kathi’s projects, at this stage in my life I probably would not be exposed to young people at all,” he said.

For Froes, working with senior citizens helps the young and old understand each other. Plus, learning about other countries in a forum such as the model U.N. gives everyone involved a better understanding of the world.

“I liked having the experience of being with someone elderly,” she said. “One-to-one talking about deep things and actual issues, it’s good, I think.”

The model U.N. initiative is part of Yarmouth’s commitment to issues of aging as one of the World Health Organization’s “age-friendly communities,” Bailey said. Yarmouth became a member of the World Health Organization in January 2014 and the second town in the state to declare itself an age-friendly community. The mission, Bailey said, is to address issues of aging in a way that involves and helps people of all ages and to share successes and failures with other communities.

In December, Bailey traveled to New York City to present the intergenerational model U.N. program to the actual United Nations, where she spoke during a pull-out session for a working group on aging.

“I was in awe of it all,” she said of the experience.

Bailey’s hope is that towns and cities across the world will pick up on the intergenerational model U.N. and start hosting their own.

“We cannot begin to change our communities for the better for our older persons if we do not include all ages in that journey,” she said.

Before wrapping up the session, the pairs representing 16 countries sectioned off into groups and wrote seven resolutions asking nations to provide health care, housing and education to senior citizens and to end gender discrimination and exploitation of third world countries. All of the resolutions passed.

To Bailey, that part of the session displayed the students’ sincere compassion.

“If we look to our youth,” she said, “they’ll build better communities than we will.”